The flesh of the humpback whale which died after becoming stranded off the Wadden Sea island of Texel last year produced enough energy to keep five Dutch families in electricity for a year, the AD reported on Friday.

Once the carcass had been stripped, three containers of 16,000 kilos of blubber and flesh were then processed into oil and meal which were used to create green energy and biofuels and added to motor oil, the paper said.

The skeleton of the whale, nicknamed Johanna, will go on show at the Naturalis natural history museum in Leiden.

Gert Vons of marine organisation Sea Shepherd told the AD the recycling of the dead whale is ‘wonderful’. ‘You can’t just throw a whale in the bin. It’s great if you can be so practical,’ he said.

Earlier stories
Humpback whale was Johanna not Johannes
Stranded humpback whale is dead
Stranded whale survives euthanasia as second whale washes up